Here’s a curiosity I found. It’s a metal printing plate that was used to print an issue of SGT. ROCK comics, circa 1976. Normally a printing plate such as this is a mirror image of the finished artwork, but I’ve flopped it here so you can read Kanigher’s script.

They often describe Joe Kubert’s faces as “sculpted”. In this context they really become “sculpture”!

Beautiful. Has anyone tried displaying plates such as this in a gallery, not as merely an artifact of the commercial printing process, but as a found art object in its own right?

Zack Blackstone December 12th, 2010
7:25 pm

It would work best for display in an art gallery if the comic page it was a plate of was wordless and could be read backwards or forwards. Has anyone ever done a comic book palindrome? There’s that old comic strip that you can turn upside down and get a different story…

Rick December 13th, 2010
11:22 am

Size might be an issue for an art gallery, since the plates are the same size as the printed comic and hard to read. Being able to zoom in with the scanner allows that rich micro-detail that makes these things so compelling.